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The Organic Future of Technology
Originally posted here.
Future generations will look back on our era as one of clunky technology, what with our noisy machines with their unrecyclable, non-biodegradable parts and reliance on fossil fuels. Forget Al Gore and all our global warming talk, they'll just be scoffing at how barbaric our industry was! After all, scientists for generations before them have been advancing new organic technologies. These scientists, you see, have been working under the realization that Evolution has produced mighty efficient methods of energy-utilization, movement, and intelligence. As so they have been toiling frenetically as mad scientists are wont to do, trying to tap into Evolution's store of knowledge and apply their findings to their society's needs.
Although the 2000s would still fall under what they consider the era of Industrial Barbarism, they would cede that the roots of their civilization's triumphs stretch back to that earlier era. After all, that decade saw tinkering with sugar as an energy source. Our era, they would note, relied largely on finite resources whose use damaged the planet and caused diplomatic and social dissension.
Our vehicles and robots, meanwhile, were exceedingly clunky, made mobile via motor-animated wheels or propellers. Mobility lagged while noise pollution soared. Our generation saw a tiny step, the invention of a blimp that swam through the air like a fish. It never caught on, of course, as a significant mode of transportation, but to people who paid attention to it, it opened their eyes to the realization that Nature had already invented wonderful methods of mobility, and research into artificial muscles increased immensely. Without successive generations of scientists copying and tweaking these biological methods, they'd ponder, they'd be without their swimming ships and flying cars, powered not by petroleum, but from a substance they call "Nectar."
They'd go on: Our generation's computers? Based on primitive circuitry, with its reliance on metal and all. Their computers, after all, would be modeled after the brain, organic in composition and of a much more holistic circuitry. Their robots would have practical brains--providing one of the more worrisome aspects of their times.
Prosthetics would be the biggest example of our clunkiness, although we made major steps compared to our twentieth century counterparts. The old idea of replacement parts, from pirate's peg legs to the Great War's artificial faces, gave way, admittedly, to more aesthetically-pleasing replacement parts in the early 21st century. But still, a person who was in need of a new limb or organ was treated as a machine in need of a replacement part--scrap parts taken from junked machines or from machines with spares (donated organs) or they were constructed as pieces of machinery, to be connected to the person like a mechanical component (prosthetic limbs). This future generation, growing new limbs and organs (either on the body or off), would be both amused and horrified at our machinistic view of the human body.
This list could go on, but one more example will suffice for now. Far fewer animals, in this future generation's day, would be killed for food, their society relying largely on vat-grown meat. Sure, there would still be meat-eating traditions in parts of the world, some people refusing the vat-meat altogether, and others eating real meat during special observances, but, by and large, animal-meat will have been pushed to the fringes. More land, freed from the demands of ranching, would be available to 'wild nature' and to people. And, there'd be less of the damn bovines to release excess methane into the atmosphere. Stupid cows.
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